EFF asks the FTC to protect the public from Digital Rights Management

EFF called on the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) this week to mitigate the damage that DRM technologies cause consumers.

In public comments submitted to the FTC, EFF explained how DRM gives industry leaders unprecedented power to influence the pace and nature of innovation, not to mention risking customers' privacy rights and the security of their computers.

EFF's comments were filed in conjunction with the FTC's Town Hall on DRM, set for March 25 in Seattle. The Town Hall is free and open to the
public.

If this works the way that other government requests for comment worked, sometime in the coming month all the comments received will be made public, and a period will be opened for people to write responses to the comments.

I hope it works out that way; it will be entertaining to see what arguments pro-DRM advocates put forward, and to see what various anti-DRM names have posted things without saying so publicly.

I posted my last comment before seeing Glenn’s just above it. I went and looked at the 700 comments the FTC had received, and clicked on a couple of dozen of them at random.

Not one that I found had anything nice to say about the current implementation of DRM. (A couple found the idea of DRM all right in principle, but had the same problems with how it is implemented in practice as the rest of them.)